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Celerity

(42,666 posts)
Fri Oct 30, 2020, 09:04 PM Oct 2020

Why the 2020s Could Be as Dangerous as the 1850s

Democrats could win decisively next week. But that still wouldn’t neutralize minority Republican power.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/10/biden-2020-trump-election/616912/



If Joe Biden beats Donald Trump decisively next week, this election may be remembered as a hinge point in American history: the moment when a clear majority of voters acknowledged that there’s no turning back from America’s transformation into a nation of kaleidoscopic diversity, a future that doesn’t rely on a backward-facing promise to make America great again. But that doesn’t mean the voters who embody the nation’s future are guaranteed a lasting victory over those who feel threatened by it. With Biden embracing America’s evolution and Trump appealing unrestrainedly to the white voters most fearful of it, the 2020 campaign marks a new peak in the most powerful trend shaping politics in this century. Over the past two decades, and especially since Barack Obama’s election in 2008, voters have re-sorted among the parties and thus reconfigured the central fault line between them. Today Republicans and Democrats are divided less by class or region than by attitudes toward the propulsive demographic, cultural, and economic shifts remaking 21st-century America. On one side, Republicans now mobilize what I’ve called a “coalition of restoration”; on the other, Democrats assemble a “coalition of transformation.”

Republicans have grown more reliant on support from mostly white and Christian constituencies and the exurban, small-town, and rural communities that have been the least touched, and most unnerved, by cultural and economic transitions: growing diversity in race, religion, and sexual orientation; evolving roles for women; and the move from an industrial economy to one grounded in the Information Age. Democrats have become the party of the people and places most immersed in, and welcoming of, those shifts: people of color, Millennials and members of Generation Z, secular adults who don’t identify with any religious tradition, and college-educated white professionals, all of them clustered in the nation’s largest metropolitan centers. Heading into the campaign’s final weekend, Trump is facing erosion on both sides of this divide, with Biden consolidating most elements of the coalition of transformation, eroding Trump’s advantages with blue-collar and older white voters, and laying siege to the midsize industrial cities across the Rust Belt that moved sharply toward the president in 2016.

Behind this two-front advance, Biden has consistently led Trump in national polls and surveys of the six swing states that both sides are most heavily contesting, especially the three in the Rust Belt that tipped the 2016 race to the president: Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Many Democrats remain unnerved by the prospect that, like a general advancing an army under cover of night, Trump will mobilize an unanticipated turnout surge from his base voters and win the Electoral College (if not the popular vote), the same way he did last time. That’s possible, but it remains less likely than in 2016, because the voters opposing him appear determined to turn out in much higher numbers, too. I’ve often said that modern American politics can be reduced to a single question: How long can Paducah tell Seattle what to do? Next week the answer may be that Seattle—that is, America’s future—has mobilized to reclaim control of the nation’s direction from Paducah—its past—and perhaps by a resounding margin. Without discounting the possibility of an upset, Tuesday’s results are likely to demonstrate that the Democrats’ coalition of transformation is now larger—even much larger—than the Republicans’ coalition of restoration.

With Trump solidifying the GOP’s transformation into a “white-identity party … a nationalist party, not unlike parties you see in Europe, … you see the Democratic Party becoming the party of literally everyone else,” as the longtime Republican political consultant Michael Madrid, a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, told me. The broad backlash against Trump’s vision of the GOP across the diverse, metro-based emerging America could provide Democrats unified control of government for the first time since 2010. It could also underscore the growing difficulty Republicans will face attracting majority support in elections to come. And yet even a decisive Democratic win would not guarantee that the party can actually implement its policy agenda. As if laying sandbags against the coming demographic wave, Republicans have erected a series of defences that could allow them to impede their rivals—even if demographic and social change combine to more clearly stamp Democrats as the nation’s majority party in the years ahead. And that could make the 2020s the most turbulent decade for America since the 1850s, when a very similar dynamic unfolded.

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Why the 2020s Could Be as Dangerous as the 1850s (Original Post) Celerity Oct 2020 OP
Excellent article. dhol82 Oct 2020 #1

dhol82

(9,351 posts)
1. Excellent article.
Fri Oct 30, 2020, 09:25 PM
Oct 2020

Let’s see where this goes.
We might actually end up with The United States of Canada.

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